Friday, June 24, 2011

USA - An FBI raid on one website took out servers for over one hundred other companies "collateral damage"

[LA Times] The FBI took several servers of DigitalOne, a Web hosting company based in Switzerland, knocking offline the websites of at least 120 companies, according to the chief executive of the Swiss company.

The raid occurred early Tuesday morning at a data center in Virginia where DigitalOne leases space for some of its servers, DigitalOne CEO Sergej Ostroumow said in an email.

The company's own website and those of 120 other companies were still down 35 hours after the raid, Ostroumow said.

"FBI was interested in one of our clients and in his servers, but they took besides target servers tens of not related servers of other customers," he said. "Most of our customers are sub-providers which host hundreds and thousands of smaller customers."

Among the affected companies was Curbed, a network of news sites that went offline all Tuesday as a result of the raid.

"Our tech team was kind of pulling their hair out trying to figure out what happened," said Lockhart Steele, the company's president. "Apparently we were taken out as collateral damage due to someone else in that rack who was doing something suspicious or problematic."

FBI raid of DigitalOne Web hosting firm knocks out sites of more than 100 companies

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